Questions tagged [everyday-life]
Questions marked with this tag should concern habits and customs in normal people's lives. This can be limited to some epoch in history and to some region.
121 questions
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How long did Americans continue to drink tea before switching over to coffee?
According to the story every American child is told, King George III placed the U.S.A. into an unwinnable mode by placing a tax on tea. Then the Boston Tea Party happened among other things, together ...
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Why turn brass strips into rolls?
In a manuscript, Mendel I = Amb. 317.2°, from The Virtual Historical Collection of Nuremberg City Library, I found several images of brass strips being beaten into rolls, but no explanation as for why ...
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When did the practice of correlating birthdays to zodiac signs begin?
When did the practice of correlating birthdays to zodiac signs begin ?
For this to happen, 3 preliminary stages must have been completed as prerequisites:
Someone had to develop the zodiac circle.
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In the Soviet Union, what was the average cookware available in the home?
What was the average cookware available in someone's home (apartment) in the Soviet Union? The period I'm most interested in is the post-war up to the Brezhnev Stagnation, so this is roughly 1945 - ...
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Did active frontiersmen really eat 20,000 calories a day? How does this compare to other highly-active people in recorded history?
I am currently midway through this book, The Company: The Rise And Fall of the Hudson's Bay Empire. It is really good.
One thing that keeps coming up is the amount of rations needed for each explorer, ...
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Do we have primary sources for what ordinary people used before mirrors became widely affordable?
Mirrors are an everyday item with a very long history. However, until 200 or so years ago mirrors, at least large ones, were too expensive for ordinary people (ordinary in the sense of e.g. being not ...
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What was the nature of conflict between Helvetii and German in prelude to Gallic Wars?
In Caesar's diaries from Gallic Wars, he states that Helvetii battled Germans "almost daily, repelling them from their own territories or waging wars on German frontiers".
What were German ...
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What percentage of households in Sweden in the 1990s only had over-the-air TV?
I was born in the mid-1980s, so I grew up in Sweden in the 1990s. Our family was not rich, but we somehow did live in a house, as opposed to an apartment/flat.
We only had an antenna on the roof, with ...
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How would a Roman soldier address his superior officer? Reversely, how would a superior officer address a lower ranking Roman soldier?
Let's pretend for a second there is a legionnaire named Marcus and a centurion named Augustus. Would the legionnaire refer to his superior officer as "Centurion Augustus"? Or would he say &...
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Was the Milky Way visible in all its glory in pre-industrial times? [closed]
So, this is a bit of a silly question admittedly, but it's something that seems obviously the case, yet we never really acknowledge or make a big deal out of.
Before the industrialisation and all the ...
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Were there luxury restaurants in East Germany?
I was recently reading the excellent book Mac B, Kid Spy: Mac Saves the World by Mac Barnett.
It is set in 1989, and Mac crosses the Berlin Wall to infiltrate the Television Tower in East Berlin.
I ...
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Was FDR right that a garden hose was really $15 in 1940 (c.a. $300 today)?
As FDR stated in a White House Press conference on December 17, 1940: "What I am trying to do is eliminate the dollar sign. All right! Well let me give you an illustration: Suppose my neighbor's ...
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How do ancient Chinese "mirrors" such as these in the National Museum function?
In the National Museum of China we find "mirrors" from various Chinese dynasties:
A photo I took of "mirrors" at the National Museum of China in Beijing
Notably, these mirrors are ...
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How does this bird trap work?
www.nuernberger-hausbuecher.de provides the illustration below:
I want to know how this bird trap mechanism works, as shown by this bird hunter of the medieval period on the book image, and it doesn'...
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Are there any accounts of everyday life during the Black Death?
How did everyday life looked like for people living during the Plague?
I'm mostly interested in trying to understand things from the point of view of a regular person living in Europe. For example, I ...
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